


Count the Cost

by katydidmischief (cassiejamie)



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Blackouts, Gen, Homelessness, Post-Movie(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-20 16:31:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1517447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassiejamie/pseuds/katydidmischief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He looks blearily at the television hanging on the wall, the man on it talking about sacrifice and the heroes who gave everything they had to their country.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/18271.html?thread=43386463#t43386463) on the [avenger kink meme](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/).

It starts with a sandwich—white bread with turkey, cheese, mayo, lettuce, tomato neatly wrapped in butcher paper with an inner cut layer of thinly-waxed paper—set atop the dumpster he's gone hunting in for the last two days. A note rests with it, his name, the old one, written in thick black marker lines. It reads: _We don't leave our men behind. 800-273-8255._

He hesitates to actually eat the sandwich, but in the end, the hunger wins and he downs it too quickly; the nausea sinks into his gut, but he's lived so long with pain that it doesn't even make him wince. Instead, he settles more comfortably into the little spot at the back of the alley that makes him invisible to passersby to stare at the words, try to understand what they mean.

Eventually the strong winds chase him back to the shelter he's managed to get a bed in, New York not quite as beautiful in late spring as he remembers...

(He doesn't actually trust those memories.

He doesn't trust any of them to be real.)

...and reads the note as he lays in his cot, wool blanket wrapped over his legs; the moonlight makes it difficult to see the words, but he makes them out anyway. He's still holding it when he falls asleep, crinkling the paper in his fist.

By morning, though, his faculties returned with good sleep and a full belly, he realizes that someone knows who he is and he hastily packs his meager belongings of a toothbrush, toothpaste, change of clothing, and a few pairs of charity underwear into a rucksack. Then he quietly signs out, tells the desk girl that he won't be back, and resolutely starts walking.

Steve misses Bucky by 63 minutes.


	2. Chapter 2

Hartford is three weeks of uninterrupted anonymity, Providence four. Taunton and Quincy are barely blips for how long he stays but both are equally absent of notice.

Then there's Boston.

He arrives on a very dreary, wet summer evening, and since the last time he'd been to this particular city was decades ago, he isn't sure of where he should head for shelter. A few coins jangle in the pocket of his cargoes and he reluctantly goes hunting for a payphone, finding one at an Asian grocery a short distance away. 411 gives him the address to a homeless shelter on Isabella street, but at this hour he's sure they're already closed up for the night.

So he wanders the nearby streets for a while, meandering his way deeper into Chinatown and then into the theater district, where a Dunkin Donuts tempts him in. It is here that, as he stands by a garbage can counting out the change he's found along the way on a spare bit of counter, a woman—brunette but silvering, short coiffed bob, jeans and a buttoned down top beneath a light sweater—sets a handful of crisp bills down amid the quarters and dimes.

“My father served in the 107th,” she whispers to him, then squeezes his right wrist and is gone from his side. The tinkling of the bells over the door tell him she's left, yet he cannot find the strength to unfreeze himself and move to order, not for some time; his heart thumps wildly in his chest and his ears ring loudly, those bells on loud repeat in his mind.

Slowly, he comes back to himself, heart rate returning to normal and the ringing ebbing back to its usual low-grade background noise, and with a difficult swallow, he gathers the bills and coins into a shaking hand.

The ladies behind the counter watch him approach, apprehension clear on their faces, and gather his order quickly. He knows, with a sinking feeling, that though they are open for another hour, he cannot stay here to hide from the rain: the staff are all young and likely their parents are already uncomfortable with the hour their children have to work until, he cannot bring himself to heap more worry on them.

The Common is open though, and he figures there has to be a spot somewhere in the park with enough coverage to settle down and eat, maybe even sleep until the PD comes through to clear the vagrants in the early morning. And there is: a smallish pond, the kind with a fountain in the middle that is covered partially by a willow tree and partially by some maples or chestnuts, he's not sure which, a ways down from the entrance he'd chosen. The rain, more misty than pounding right now, is pretty much blocked by the leaves, leaving him a small patch of hard earth to sit on.

His throat is still feeling oddly as he eats, the adrenaline from earlier having constricted it or so it feels, but every bite goes down, rubbery egg and limp bacon and gluey cheese the best meal he's had in days, especially when washed down by too-hot, slightly-stale black coffee.

He folds up the paper wrapper from the food and places it into the empty cup, then into the brown bag that he rolls and sets it into the trashcan nearby. The napkins he hadn't used go into the ziplock he carries, half-used books of matches he'd picked up from various places and a needle and thread tucked in there as well, and he replaces that in his rucksack before slinging his arms through the straps and laying down, arms tight over his belongings as he falls asleep.

It is not a restful night. Few are, but tonight is exceptionally bleak: his nightmares are thick with screams he knows are his own, his head threatening to split open from the agony of the machine clamped over him. There's a frigid feeling that sets into his bones, one memory from dozens of being forced into cryo.

He vomits on the shoes of the officer who wakes him.

(Steve takes a puddlejumper out of JFK and makes it to Logan 121 minutes after Sam had called with a location; it's another 23 to navigate the T with the help of three somewhat drunk college kids, a police officer with a thick southie accent, and several texts from Natasha who has apparently spent vast amounts of time in this particular city.

He'd forgotten to check what time the Dunkin Donuts closed and he sits against the scaffolding, contemplating his next move.

144 minutes, and he sighs as he tells himself he'll have to find a hotel for the night and then go searching in the morning.)

The shelter opens at eight, but he's been there since six and an old priest takes pity on him, ushering him inside as other members of the staff get ready for the day. Apparently, the place is Catholic-run and most who stay work within the church in exchange for a bed.

He manages to make it an hour, choking down a breakfast of sugar cookies and juice, but he knows this is not a place he can stay: something about the building gives him chills, reminds him of too many things that he can't grasp.

“I'm sorry,” he murmurs as he slings his bag over his shoulder, “I have to go.”

The priest doesn't argue or guilt, instead telling him, “There's a city shelter a half an hour's walk south of here,” before writing an address on the back of a program and handing both that and a small pouch over.

He takes them, surprised when a pewter and wood rosary falls into his hand from the pouch, no words come to his mind and he for a moment he just blinks at it before nodding at the old man. “Thank you, Father,” he finally gets out, wrapping the rosary around his good wrist; he walks out of the church with the crucifix tucked up against his palm.

But he doesn't head to the other shelter: city run anything means names and birthdates and all those other identifiers that will result in his being taken back.

He can't go back.

He won't go back.

Captain America, SHIELD... They might have cut off one head, but there's always two more, and he won't be their pawn.

Nausea hits along the walk north, and when he reaches Newbury Street, he turns east; the warmth of the summer begins to seep into his chilled bones and he ducks into an air-conditioned bookstore, dragging the brim of his hat further down his forehead as he passes by the cashier. A display of magazines catches his eye, the grainy picture of a man on the front cover: it's someone he knows, this he is deeply sure of, but he cannot say who it is or how he knows them.

(It's himself. It's a picture of himself from a security feed in Washington the day the Triskelion fell, the day SHIELD was announced to the world: the mech arm has been cropped out of the shot for whatever reason, only his face and upper torso visible to whomever was reading the story, and the left side is partially obscured by smoke from a car fire. The black around his eyes darkens his expression as does the long curtain of hair, the slight reddening of his skin at one temple, just beneath one eye; he looks well-muscled yet unhealthy at the same time.

But he doesn't recognize that it's him.

It isn't because he hasn't seen his face—he's seen it in every dirty gas station bathroom mirror, in the glass of windows as he waited in line for a bed at a shelter, in the curves of car windshields parked on the street—he's seen it plenty. No, it's because his mind is locked into damage control, mopping up the bits and pieces of his scattered psyche and puzzling them together in a better approximation than the one HYDRA had. To recognize himself would bring forward the memories of a young man on a mountainside and a hardened man with a mask in the same breath, to remind him of a voice at the back of his mind that screams a name that he can't bear to whisper in the dark.)

He moves on, fingers trailing over book spines as he winds deeper into the store. He finds plays by Shakespeare and Chekhov on a bargain rack for a few bucks each, spends a few minutes trying to talk himself out of buying either one, and finds that he can't bring himself to put them back: he was denied books and music for so long that he finds himself craving both.

Still, he goes to get something from the little in-house cafe before he goes to the register, allowing him a few minutes to covertly count the money he's got left before and after ordering a juice and cheese danish. The tables are tightly fitted together and there's only one seat empty with himself and a harried looking mother with a small child clinging to her both looking for a spot. He doesn't even think twice about giving it over to her, something in his chest tightening as he stashes his order into his rucksack.

It leaves him less time to think about whether or not to take the books. He's not sure if that's good or bad, but it certainly helps him to decide when the wisp of a memory plays in his thoughts—

_”Me, poor man, my library,” then, “Was dukedom large enough.”_

_“You been stealing from the nuns' library again, Buck?”_

_A smirk on his own lips. “I betcha they won't even notice.”_

—and he places both copies onto the counter as the twist in his heart stops.

“Will this be all?” The young lady asks, her smile dropping when she looks up at him; her eyes flick between the wall at his back and him and then the smile returns. “On the house.”

In his hand, the worn bills flutter a bit as his good hand trembles. “I...”

“It's free book day.”

“I have two?” he remarks, adrenaline beginning to ease into his veins.

Without missing a beat, she tells him, “It's two free books day.”

“I can pay,” he murmurs, eyes drifting up to lock with hers, adding, “I'm not stealing,” as if he's trying to convince himself of it too.

“You can't steal what's free, sir.”

For a few seconds he stands there, trying to process what was happening through the hazy need to get out of there, realizes that he's still extending the money toward her, and pulls his hand back; he licks his lips and glances around the tiny space before taking the books back in hand, and he asks, “Why?”

She shrugs one shoulder and gives him a rueful smile. “I know how hard it is to survive out there. Books are how I kept myself sane, too.”

Nothing about war, nothing about soldiers.

“Oh,” he nods.

“Yeah. Stay safe,” she tells him, “And try to stay away from the higher tourism parts of the city. Cops.”

“Thanks.”

(She calls the hotline 22 seconds after Bucky leaves the store. It takes another 39 for Sam to get the message from one of his guys, a full 1 minute for him to get in touch with Steve who then summarily arrives to talk to the girl—Emily—13 minutes later.

When he goes walking in the direction Bucky had, a person selling paintings a block up confirms that he'd seen the man in question and pointed Steve toward a cross-street; another person directs him up toward the Common.

The trail runs cold there, no one else having taken notice despite the fact that Bucky is wearing a damn jacket and glove in the late August heat.

Steve sighs.)


	3. Chapter 3

He reads his books in record time, then reads them again, and when he tucks them away, it's because a passerby has dropped a newspaper onto the bench beside him. It's something different and something he should read anyway, keep tabs on what's happening with HYDRA and SHIELD.

There's surprisingly little about either group on the front page, though there are several articles further in that talk about the final death toll from the take down at SHIELD's HQ and HYDRA's new-found strongholds at SHIELD bases in Europe and Africa. There's a report on several still-unaccounted-for agents whom had been doing undercover work... and a note on Steve Roger's on-going efforts to locate the Winter Soldier-slash-Bucky Barnes.

His head buzzes with that name, static filling his ears.

Then he blacks out. Not the kind where a person collapses in a heap and wakes up to medics and penlights: the kind where you're awake and you're moving and for whatever reason your brain just throws up its proverbial hands and announces it's going out for half an hour.

He wakes to blood and the sharp roar of recent pain.

His good arm hangs limply at his side, coagulated blood sticking to his fingers. Just attempting to shift to stand, he realizes that the arm is not sitting in the socket, the stretched ligaments and tendons giving him a warning shock, and he thumps his head against the wall at his back.

“Fuck,” he murmurs, then, as a myriad of emotions settle over him, he lets out a growl and smacks his head against the brick again; the tears that spring up are swiped at with his gloved hand.

Someone is sure to notice a passerby in this state—people with visible injuries activate a baser protective instinct in others—so he knows he can't move out of the alleyway just yet. He needs to get the arm back into place and get as much of the blood off as he can with the few wetwipes stashed in his rucksack, and then hopefully he can find one of those anonymous clinics where they treat you and cut you loose and don't ever ask questions.

What actually happens is this: he forces the arm back into place, biting down on one of his bag's leather straps to muffle the involuntary scream, and he uses a mix of wetwipes, napkins, and a half-full discarded bottle of water, then he fashions a sling out of his spare shirt and heads back into the city, trying to reorient.

He never goes to a clinic.

Instead, he goes to a CVS, palming certain items as he wanders the aisles while others go into the basket. Neosporin, bandaging material, tape, all end up hidden in his jacket while bandaids, vitamin waters, and crackers get carried around in the open.

He adds some aspirin and is trying to work out the cost of what he's already picked with the added medication when a man looks up at the aisle at him. The guy's somehow familiar—like the man on the magazine, but not—so he doesn't drop his goods and run, though he's still unsure.

The guy is a bit below average height, brown hair, blue eyes, not particularly handsome but not exactly ugly... the neighbor boy kind of looks.

“Hey, so, Steve's probably going to get here in like fifteen, twenty minutes because that phone chain of his works pretty fast,” the guy tells him, “and while I think you should really let him find you, I know you're kind not ready for that.”

He takes a step back. “Who the hell are you?”

“Clint Barton. Former agent of SHIELD, now agent of what ever the fuck I want.” The guy—Clint—nods at him. “Look, I've been watching you stuffing shit into your pockets for the last ten minutes, which means the security cameras have probably got footage of it too and while, like, ninety percent of the country wants to throw you ticker tape parades and parties and banquets, there's still ten percent who wouldn't care if you got picked up for stealing.”

He deflates: he needs the supplies, but he can't get picked up by the police and he just doesn't have the energy to do more than drop his basket at this point. He starts pulling the bits he'd squirreled away into it, before he hefts his bag up higher on one arm and sighs, knowing he's fucked up this attempt, but maybe at the next store he'll be able to get away with at least the aspirin.

Before he can even get moving toward the exit, Clint's there, snatching the basket and getting a feel of his forehead. “Lemme see the arm,” Clint says, stunning him into compliance, and once he's peeked at the open wounds, declares, “You need more than this,” and drags his new cohort around the store for added bandaging materials, a proper sling, half a dozen over the counter meds, and some boxed foodstuffs.

Then he pays for every last item in the basket, adds a couple of chocolate bars, and hands the bags over. “Look, when you're ready, call the VA. There's a phone line that this guy, Sam—he's Steve's friend—set up just for people to call when they found you and all you gotta do is give them a location. Steve'll probably show up with bells on and an orchestra in that case.

“Just... be careful until then. And if those get infected, go to a doc in the box, all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, thanks.”

(When Steve arrives at the CVS, Clint is waiting for him, sitting on a ledge of brick on the storefront. They both size each other up for a moment before Steve says, “You're supposed to be in New York with Tony.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “Stark needs more help than I do,” he replies, “and sitting around the Tower wasn't getting me a location on Coulson.”

Of course Coulson would be the one to help Clint tame the demons in his head leftover from Loki's control, though everyone around him is still concerned that Clint could have another psychotic break. But that's a concern that Steve has to put on the back burner for a few minutes.

“Is Bucky here?”

“He was. Left ten minutes ago, headed toward the harbor.”

“And you let him go?”

Clint's nod is anything but contrite or ashamed; he uncrosses his legs as he gets to his feet, and tells Steve, “Not everyone is ready to come home when they should. Some of us need a little more time to figure out that we even have a soft place to land.”

“He needs help, Clint. Like you did.”

There's a moment of silence between them, then, “You're lucky you've never been brainwashed, Cap. Thinking you know what's right and what's wrong and that you're doing good work or God's work or whatever you want to call it,” Clint glances around, “And when you come out of it, at first, you think you know which way is up, but the reality is, you don't even trust yourself because you don't know what's a decision you're making yourself and what's something they programmed into you.”

“That's why he needs help. Deprogramming.”

“You say that like it's simple.” Clint shifts. “Give him time. He knows you're out here looking for him, he knows the phone line is there. Just give him time to come to you on his terms—let him have that much control.”)

With the confirmation that he is being sought and autumn near, he makes the choice to head south a few days after his strange meeting with Clint. He needs to get out of the Northeast before the snow comes and if he starts now, he should be able to keep ahead of the frost.

He takes a longer route down through Connecticut, spends a few days in Manhattan where panhandling gets him enough money for a bus ticket to DC—

_Sitting against a wall in the subway, he feels so awkward and raw. His arm is killing him, but the wounds are healing over and he figures the pain will ebb in time, but the way he cradles the good arm seems to work on the busy crowd of people in the tunnel._

_Slips of paper appear a few times amid the bills, a bottle of water and a bottle of Gatorade handed over by the grandchildren of an older man sporting one of those blue ballcaps with a ship number and name in gold letters; a guy with neon yellow hair and a motorcycle jacket sits and shares his dinner, before flicking a five dollar bill and some change into the coffee can._

_Someone tells him they saw his picture on Ellen, that he has people who would like to see him come home, before stuffing a ten into the can, and he decides right then that it's time to head back to the shelter._

—and he settles into a small, charity-run shelter while he decides whether or not to head for Louisiana or Florida.

A guy in the next bed tells him, “Louisiana, man, good food down there. Nice people.”

He nods and throws that onto his mental pros list as he drifts off, but the morning leaves him no clearer and as he waits for the last shower, a bar of donated soap and a bic razor in one hand, he thinks he might try to find a library somewhere and find tourist books on both states.

The shower lasts thirty seconds: he can't lift his arm high enough to deal with his hair and the warm water on the arm makes him feel dizzy. He basically rinses off the muck and sweat, towels off enough to get his jacket and glove on and finds himself a section of mirror away from the other men to shave.

The flare of pain when he lifts his arm is sudden and weakens his knees.

“Hey, you all right?” he's asked.

“Yeah, I'm fine,” he gets out through grit teeth.

He skips shaving, giving the packaged razor back to the guy at the desk, then goes to collect his bag from the locker he's been assigned. His arm, by then, has stopped feeling as flesh is being flayed from bone and he sets off into the city on the hunt for cheap maps and some deciding factor for the direction he should head.

The library ends up having both in the form of a sweet old man who helps him with Google and the photocopier, and when he leaves, he feels secure in his choice to go to Louisiana if only because of the climate and the distance from DC.

He stashes the maps and other papers into his rucksack as he thanks the old man, not understanding when he's told, “I hated Pierce ever since Bogota,” until long after he's made his way to one of the parks.

DC is gorgeous in early autumn, the hint of orange in the leaves, and he ends up lingering.

Sentiment was never part of his nature, wiped out by HYDRA, but for some reason he finds himself struggling to leave despite the turn of the day toward night; he feels the pull to stay altogether warring with the need to go, to get away from those who seek to drag him back into a world filled with his regrets.

But there was the man on the bridge who'd been adamant that they knew each other.

_Bucky!_

He sucks in a breath, lets it out slowly. He forces his body to relax, his bad hand to unclench from his wounded arm and he glances at his watch to find that five minutes have passed in the blink of an eye—better than before, though still something to cause him unease.

“Fuck,” he murmurs under his breath, dropping his chin to his chest; a memory starts to push itself forward, a vague flicker of snow and yelling and he clenches his eyes shut until it stops. He isn't ashamed to say that he flees after, begs the desk guy to let him sign in fifteen minutes early and curls up so tightly in his cot that he honestly believes the world is at bay.

But he wakes in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and his arm swollen, and his heart sinks as he takes in the sight of himself in the mirror. Red streaks track from his arm to his torso and now that he's paying attention, he can feel the soreness in his underarm which has actually been there for days.

There's infection. It's getting worse.

Shit.

He thinks of the number in his bag for a brief moment, before resolutely swearing never to call it: he's made it this far, he can make it farther.

“Doc in the box,” he tells the mirror.

But it's too early to go out and if the guy at the desk sees him like this, he knows the staff will insist that he be taken to a hospital, so he washes his face with water and paper towels, drags himself back to the dirty cot, and forces himself to go back to sleep which is quite easily done given how terrible he's beginning to feel.

He doesn't even make it to the sign out desk in the morning; he doesn't even make it to the shower.

(He takes a while to wake fully then gradually manages to sit up, but once he attempts to stand, his body rebels the only way it can at this point: it drops his blood pressure—and him—through the floor, and he comes back to himself to the shelter nurse frowning with two members of the staff on either side.

“Mr. Barnes,” one says, “Is there someone we can call?”

And a face flashes to the front of his thoughts.

“Steve.”


	4. Chapter 4

He puts up a fight when the paramedics arrive, his mind caught in a cycle between memories and nightmares and he jerks against restraining hands.

_Wipe him._

The scream is torn from him; his teeth clench until it's painful. There's the tinge of copper at the back of his mouth and there's a sickening cracking-crunching noise that is one of his molars, the one that used to contain a cyanide capsule, breaking.

Suddenly, a gently spoken, “Easy, Buck,” makes it through the mess in his head, and he stills. Not for long, maybe a few seconds, but evidently it's enough time for someone to inject something into his good arm.

The world eases back, clouds his vision in haze, and he finally relaxes back against the cot, looking blearily towards the man standing to his side.

 _'Blonder than I remember,'_ he thinks, before promptly forcing himself to lurch toward Steve with his bad arm out and fingers ready. There's no doubt in anyone's mind that he's trying to strangle Rogers; the redhead has to drag him out of the room by his jacket.

He blacks out.

(Sam has been preparing the VA for weeks: they have every ounce of data about the Winter Soldier that the filedump had leeched onto the internet, they have deprogrammers and therapists and a neurologist standing by, and after several favors are called in, Tony Stark has supplied them with a small EMP generator to disable Barnes' left arm.

There have been medical plans drawn up to account for what they knew from callers—malnutrition, probable dehydration, sunburn, injuries—and their staff trained to go against some instincts should he become violent: there won't be orderlies struggling to restrain him, no one will try to force him into machinery or out of a place he deems safe. The likelihood of him killing someone in the attempt is too high and he doesn't need another death to weigh on him.

Seriously, the guys from psych have been absolutely adamant that he not be forced to endure anything else that could become guilt.

 _”People who come out of brainwashing on a less severe level will take on shame, fear, and guilt over stepping on a lizard, let alone their body count,”_ Howe had told them at a meeting several weeks ago.

This is all to say that when the call comes that they have Barnes, that he is coming in willingly but ill, there is a protocol and a phone chain that activates. Their ER swarms with the added personnel who'd volunteered for this; a bay is cleared out and people shifted, and by the time they're wheeling his gurney in with Captain America right there at his side, the entire hospital is in overdrive.)

He wakes.

There's an IV in his flesh arm, with a plastic tube that slings up to a large, semi-full bag of clear fluid. A round disc is stuck on the metal of his other arm and it pulses a blue light every few seconds; when he tries to lift it, nothing happens, and it should make him panic, make him nervous. For some reason, though, it's soothing and he smiles at the ceiling, hoping that this is the first step in getting the thing off completely.

For a few moments, a pleasant buzz fills him: this thing that is not his arm, that had been forced on him by men who saw him only as an experiment or an asset rather than a human being, is dead.

Then someone shuffles by in the hallway, the squeak of wheelchair tires along the linoleum, and the euphoria fades; he needs to take stock of his surroundings, determine exit paths and possible access points, and his muscles tense as he works to get himself fully upright.

“Hey, man, easy.”

His head whips to the right, where the man from earlier is sitting.

“We made Steve go home for the night, but he didn't want for you to wake up alone.” The guy leans forward, presses a button in the inside of the bedrailing to lift the head, and once that's done, he holds out a hand. “Sam Wilson.”

“I don't know you,” he gets out, his voice gritty from the efforts of his screaming earlier in the day. Still, he takes the offered hand and shakes it.

“Nah, I'm about sixty-something years younger than you are, but I did help keep your ass safe while you were running around out there.”

He nods, mutters his thanks, and closes his eyes for a moment before glancing around the room with a hint of curiosity in his eyes. He hopes it smacks of shock and bewilderment at all this 'new' technology around him, but Wilson is not fooled.

“Man, we know where they kept you. Stark's been playing in it for a couple of months.” He lifts an eyebrow. “We've seen everything. So you don't have to pretend like it's a wonderland here—they had way more advanced shit than the rest of America has—and definitely not in front of me,” Sam tells him, “So, door in front of you leads to the hall with multiple exit points. The door over there is your bathroom, no windows or access points. You're on the fifth floor, but two stories down is the roof of the lower floors, you get down there and you can hit the ledges until you get to the ground.

“But, I'm just throwing it out there, you only have to tell the nurses that you want out and they'll bring you paperwork to sign yourself out.”

His head cocks and he looks incredulous. “Really? They'd let me go? No fight?”

Sam shrugs. “I'm not saying there won't be people looking for you, particularly a star-spangled Adonis who has the type of complexes about his friends that psych people drool over, but the staff here? They're not going to strap you down and make you stay, Barnes. This ain't HYDRA.”

“You're so sure of that?”

“SHIELD got burned in the crossfire, but once the dust settled... well, people aren't stupid. They knew who to blame. The news guys took that and the SHIELD files and ran with it. Hell, half of Reddit managed to help us take down the last of the strike team.” Sam pokes at the TV remote as he talks, hesitating but ultimately flicking through channels until he hits Anderson Cooper 360. “I trust the people here.”

It's not enough, not really. Wilson might be fooled by the belief that the American government can handle HYDRA, but _he_ knows better. Cut off one head, two will take it's place, and they aren't obvious: they're orphaned teenagers, adults disillusioned with the way of things, naïve people who think that sacrificing freedom is worth the security.

_Hail HYDRA._

He dry heaves over his blanket for twenty seconds before a plastic basin is shoved under his face and he grips it simply to have something to hold. When he finishes, his head pounds in unison with the beat of his heart and he wonders if he's reached the fifth or the seventh circle of Hell.

“You oughta go back to sleep. Steve'll be by in a few hours.”

“Steve.”

“Yeah.”

He looks blearily at the television hanging on the wall, the man on it talking about sacrifice and the heroes who gave everything they had to their country. The ticker on the bottom sits beside a BREAKING NEWS graphic, reading: **James Buchanan 'Bucky' Barnes safe at DC area hospital. Steve Rogers to hold Press Conference at 11AM tomorrow.**

“He was my mission.”

“What's he now?”

He doesn't know.

But he tries to strangle Steve every time the man appears over the intervening weeks: he trashes two televisions and half a dozen radios, his reaction escalating to Rogers own image or voice. The window he breaks just because he's frustrated and a nurse tuts at him in a way that's eerily similar to the ladies he'd known back in the day: the ones in the medic tents had never put up with guff from the men and the ladies here are much the same.

He sheepishly responds with something his therapist calls the 'oh shucks, ma'am' posture, which totally fails to work on her and he ends up actually feeling sorry, as he tells the maintenance people who come to fix the window in the afternoon.

“Sister got back from Iraq and totaled her car. Guy I knew set his house on fire,” one of the men tells him, pressing the glass into place while another screws in holding plates and caulks. “A window is nothing.”

He files that into the back of his mind and once they've left, he sits in the recliner, turns on _2 Broke Girls_ , and tunes out everything. His thoughts are quieted, the anxiety that makes his skin twitch ebbs back; he feels calm and eased, no hint of HYDRA to be seen. The white noise of the hospital is drowned out by the meditation, not even the steady beep of his heart monitor cutting through.

For a few minutes, it is peace. Then he hears the footsteps as they cross toward his room from the nurses' station and the soft voices of the staff as they strain to convey something important.

It doesn't take a genius to know who it is and what they are trying to explain to him.

(Steve knows it already. He's nearly been strangled six times already, nearly been stabbed twice, but he keeps coming back because at some point, he believes, Bucky's going to realize that he needs his best friend. And, well, it's not like Bucky took all the stupid with him—Steve's got a fair amount of his own.)

The doorway is sooner-than-comfortable filled with 6'2” of blond super soldier, his expression schooled carefully into something hopefully. Or maybe it isn't carefully done, since Sam swears that Rogers really is as wholesome as he portrays.

Nonetheless, Steve clearly has the wherewithal to accept that there may be another instance of violence and he waits to see if blue eyes will cloud with the rage of the previous visits before he asks, “May I come in?”

He thinks about it for a moment—there's already been one window broken today, does he want to risk another—and then nods, waving a hand as he mentally recites a chant one of the psychiatrists had taught him.

Steve takes measured steps into the room once he has permission, stopping at the bed and settling down the edge.

It's the farthest Steve has made it into the room, but he clearly forces himself to not remark on it, instead asking, “How're you doing?”

“I'm...” he doesn't know how to answer, “...well.”

“You look better,” Steve offers, “less pale. How's your arm?”

He knows which one is being referred to: Howard Stark's boy, a motormouth named Anthony, had been by with schematics and tools and he'd managed to get the bulk of the casing off—and a large amount of the weight—to expose the wiring underneath. It'd been the first time he'd ever had a clear view of the inner workings that he could remember, and it'd chilled him to the bone.

After Tony had gone, he'd begged to have it covered and two of the nurses had chatted with him about random internet tidbits while wrapping cast padding/rolled gauze/flesh-colored coban tape in layers around the tech. They go so far as to wrap the fingers, too, and with the arm limp in the sling, he looks less like something from a Hitchcock film and more like other people walking around the hospital. An injured soldier, nothing else.

“It's healing.”

“Good. I may have gotten a little bit worried when they told me you were getting septic.”

_Understatement of the year, Stevie._

He startles at that thought, the whisper of a Brooklyn accent washing over the words, and he swallows with a clench of his jaw. His eyes close for a second and when he opens them, Steve has moved to the chair on the other side of the bed.

“You were my mission.”

Steve goes stock-still.

“You're not my mission now. It was HYDRA's directive and I'm not HYDRA,” he says, “I don't know what I am, who I am. But you do—you chased me around the eastern seaboard without any promise that I would welcome you.”

“I would have chased you around the country if I needed to,” then, “You're my friend. Always have been, always will be.”

He nods, processing the words until he finds the ability to ask, “You're not going anywhere, are you?”

There is no reluctance, no fear, no indecision, as he's told, “To the end of the line, Bucky,” with every ounce of conviction Steve can muster.

(Sam's right: Steve really sounds like a goody-two-shoes without the annoying part. He totally, completely, unequivocally believes everything that comes out of his mouth, and it's almost soothing to see the honesty written across Steve's face.

Almost.)

“I might not be the man you remember.”

“You're not. That's okay. I'm not who you might remember either.”


	5. Chapter 5

The room at the VA becomes _his_ room: the nurses have stopped referring to it as 511 or Barnes' room and started calling it James'. Rarely, one of them will slip and call it Bucky's and on those days, they walk a little softer around him, but he doesn't react the way he used to: his last black out over a nickname feels like a lifetime ago. Maybe it was.

It's been four and a half months. He hasn't tried to kill Steve for three of those; he's stopped tolerating Steve's presence and started enjoying it, started enjoying when Steve comes with cards or boardgames or an iPad loaded with games.

 _“Don't let Tony see it,”_ Steve had warned, _”He'll have a conniption.”_

So of course he shows it to Tony when he next comes to visit.

Hands still deep in the wiring and infrastructure of the arm, Tony glares at it so hard that it's a bit of a surprise that the device doesn't just up and explode. “Who would deign bring you that glorified paperweight?” he asks, tucking the screwdriver over one ear.

“Steve.”

Tony pouts and in that moment, it's like looking back seventy years at Howard. “I give the man a brand new Stark Tablet and he goes and cheats on me with Apple products.”

(It feels good, he'll admit, to joke and tease. They fight—oh, he and Tony, they fight—but where there should be anger and guilt over Howard and Maria's death and his hand in it, there is none: Tony gave him absolution.

“I made weapons. I did it without a second thought and they killed thousands of people... a lot of them were innocent, just bystanders,” Tony moves a checker, and goes on, “I didn't lose a night of sleep over it. I thought I was doing what I should, what Dad would have wanted: I was serving my country. Being a good little contractor, making them what they needed.

“Then I got kidnapped. Obi, he was Dad's business partner, and my mentor after they died, he paid a terrorist group to lock me up in a cave and when he botched it with those lovely fellows, they demanded I make them weapons or be killed.”

“So you made the weapons.”

“I thought about it, but there was someone in the cave with me. A man, Yinsen. He saved my life—got the shrapnel out of my chest, used a car battery to keep what he couldn't remove away from my heart.” Tony swipes at an eye as surreptitiously as he can, stifles the movement with a yawn and then, moving another of his checkers, says, “He was a good man. Which, considering how we met the first time and the fact that my munitions killed his family, I still think he was off his rocker to have so much faith in me. But he did everything he could to help me, to see to it that I got out of there alive.”

Tony looks up at him, steel in his eyes. “My company didn't just sell the weapons the US military used, we designed them. Actually, _I_ designed them. Every detail in a missile, a gun, it was all me,” he says, “So stop expecting me to resent you—I had a great deal more control over my actions than you ever did.”)

They banter for a while longer, Tony muttering randomly about gears and cursing loudly about neuro-interfaces, until JARVIS speaks up from Tony's phone and then he's wrapping the arm back up in the bandage materials. They pat each other on the backs and say goodbye, and for a while he has his room to himself.

A special about the Howling Commandos is playing on the History Channel, which the staff has been dreading ever since it'd been announced, and he watches every single second of it. Grinning despite himself as they narrate the lives of Dum Dum, Gabe, Morita, Falsworth, Dernier, and Steve, he feels pride to have known those men, pride that they made it out of the war alive and went on to have families and homes.

And while they'd started with Steve Rogers, they'd waited until the end to talk about Bucky Barnes, with a perfectly timed commercial break after Dernier but before his own. It's four minutes to think about whether or not he really wants or needs to see it.

He can't decide, in the end, if it is want or need that wins out, but he watches the last 22 minutes of the special watching and listening.

Steve ducks into the room around minute six and has the decency to not say anything until the credits are rolling. He is, however, tense in his shoulders and he sits in the chair by the bed instead of coming to sit on the bed.

They show a picture of all of them together before fading into the commercial break between programs, and that's when Steve asks, “You okay?” with as much of the concern bled out of his voice as he can.

“I have these nightmares,” he answers, “where I'm falling,” then, “It's a memory, I get that now. They wiped me and there was still enough left behind that I knew that I needed to remember.”

He doesn't say what he needs to: that enough of him was left behind that he knew what he was doing, knew that it was wrong. He was trying to scream and the best his subconscious could do was drag a memory to the surface, play it for him whenever he was jammed into cryo.

But Steve seems to hear it all anyway. “You weren't in control, Buck. It wasn't your fault.”

“I must have known enough.” He moves away, puts some distance between himself and Steve, and stares out the window at the people coming and going from the hospital in the evening twilight. “The docs... I... I think I was wiped because I would start to remember,” he says, pausing to add, “Before. Life before.”

He keeps his gaze out the window, unable to look at Steve because he knows exactly what will be written all over the other man's face: forgiveness, worry, shame, affection. He doesn't know how he's so sure that that's what is there, but he feels it in his gut.

“You,” Steve starts, shifting closer but not crowding, “had no control. They did everything they could to make you into nothing, and yeah, you still tried to break through their conditioning and the wipes. But, Bucky,” here he slides up to the glass, making sure to not force eye contact, “you couldn't fight them—no, don't argue. That arm or no, you couldn't—and you didn't know anything but what they told you.”

Steve takes a deep breath, then goes on, “I watched the tapes. The ones from when they forced you into that... machine. The one that wiped your mind. And Stark showed me the cyrochamber they kept you in. Bucky, they had the best trained operatives in the world, the best specialists. They had access to higher levels of technology than any other agency had, and they had high ranking clearance levels. You had yourself and whatever your mind could bring up to try to fight the conditioning.

“I know the reflex to blame yourself and I know you'll always feel guilty about the people they made you kill, but I want you to understand that the blame you carry is not blame that I or most of the world will hold against you.”

“Why not? I killed people across decades, across nations. I deserve their blame.”

“When Natasha released SHIELD's records onto the internet, those included memos and other paperwork between Pierce and his men that had mentions of the program that oversaw the, uh, the Winter Soldier. Stark says the internet went obsessive and managed to piece together a lot of details and when he released the data he'd gotten from the bank where you were held, well, it was on every news channel for weeks.”

He swallows down the sudden constriction in his throat.

“How do you think I was able to get so many people to call that hotline Sam set up? It wasn't that ugly mug of yours,” Steve says then, trying to bring some levity.

The response flows easily from him, “Ha. You've got the ugliest mug of all,” which leaves him startled, and he eases away from the window to sit in his recliner again.

He continues to keep his eyes away from Steve's.

“You're a good man, Bucky.” Steve has softened his voice, but maintained the distance.

“Maybe.”

He goes silent after that, exhausted suddenly, and Steve takes his leave a few minutes later; Steve promises to come by the next afternoon, like always, but there's a hesitancy in the words. He closes the door to the room behind him, leaving it quiet but for the low droll of the History Channel.

The mild stimulation—his way of knowing that he's in this world and not in cryo, where many of the things he dreamt were dreamt of in a buzzing silence—softens the hammering of guilt and depression and allows him to think over an option that had been presented to him recently. For long minutes, he vacillates between yes or no and when he chooses, he crosses to the door and opens it to peer out for a particular person.

His main nurse is a former Marine and they've bantered back and forth for several weeks now; her name is Belinda, but he calls her LT McManus and she calls him Sergeant Barnes instead of James, and while several other nurses have removed themselves from Operation Barnsicle as Tony calls it, she hasn't shown an iota of desire to leave.

She's coming to the room with his dinner tray when he opens the door, and once she's in front of him, he tells her what he's decided. One eyebrow lifts yet she says nothing in return, waiting for him to admit that he knows that there will be a lot of talking about said decision in the extremely near future.

It's not a long wait.

“Dr. Howe is going to want to talk about this, isn't he?” He asks, trying to look bashful.

“You bet your sweet ass. Hell, if you didn't look ready to drop, I'd let him come talk to you right now.” McManus prods the tray she'd put near his bed. “Eat, sleep, get psychoanalyzed in the AM.”

He smirks. “Yes, ma'am.”

The decision is this: he needs a break from Rogers, so he puts the man on the list of those not to be admitted to see him. He knows Steve'll be upset when he finds out, knows Steve'll probably try to send a note or something to him, but he needs this.

If he's truthful, if Steve were able to admit it, they both need this.

He eats and sleeps and when Howe arrives in the morning, first thing, he's completely at peace with his request.

(Still, that night there's a press conference about the people working to rebuild SHIELD and Steve is there. He looks a little tightly drawn and Natalia is there, her hand on his wrist while he's standing beside her, and when someone asks a question directly to him, it's about medical status of a number of operatives.

When they ask about his medical status, calling him Sergeant Barnes just like McManus does, he mutes the TV quickly, takes a last glimpse at Steve with his stiff shoulders, and then turns it off completely.)


	6. Chapter 6

It's a Friday when Dr. Howe comes to his room, seven months after his admit and two months since he last saw Steve, settles into the chair, and asks, “What's your name?” like he doesn't already know the answer.

He stops mid-puttering, holding the dirty clothes he needs McManus to take to be cleaned against his chest as he replies, “James Buchanan Barnes.”

“Yes. And what does everyone call you?”

“Bucky.” He drops the clothes on his bed, eyeing the therapist with confusion, before he grips the bedrail with his good hand.

(Soon, Tony promised, there will be a nice new arm for him, one that's matched to his flesh tone and far lighter than the previous one had been. For now, they've worked from outer casing to the inner wiring to the removal of the lower part of the limb and finally weeding the wires down to the ones that are threaded to his brain to remove everything up to the shoulder.

Even mangled though it's been, he looks down at the part of his arm that remained after the fall from the train every now and then and smiles because that's it, that's his own skin.)

Howe leans back a little. “How old are you?”

“Chronologically, 96.”

“How old are you?”

He wonders what the point of this exercise is when that simple question is asked again. They've had exercises like this regularly since the very first week, meant to spur his memory as well as confirm basic pieces of his own self-reporting that the staff thinks important: his name, his age, his birthday, the ability to accept that what his emotions are valid, his slow blinding crawl toward the idea that he isn't a monster. His belief that as much as he and the Winter Soldier are the same person, they are different too.

With his head cocked and an eyebrow lifted (which everyone has pointed out is rather similar to a certain favorite nurse's), he tells Howe, “26.”

“Why haven't you gone outside?”

He jams his face up into something of bewilderment at that, opening and closing his mouth a few times. Then shrugs his good shoulder while mentally urging his muscles to loosen and unlock, and glances down at the bed for a moment. “I don't know.”

And Howe would accept that response normally—after all, not everyone has a reason or a feeling or the knowledge to explain something—but he's worked with this man for months, learned the nuances of Barnes' behavior: he doesn't buy for two seconds that Bucky doesn't know.

Particularly in light of the growing list of denied visitors from the intervening weeks.

“James.”

“I don't know.”

“What do you know?” It's asked gently, non-accusative, not to incite or invoke him to anger but to force him to think about the response so they can, together, dig for the answer.

But he's feeling confused and cornered and he doesn't say anything; he grips the rail a little tighter, chewed up nails scraping along the hard plastic, working up the moisture in his mouth until he can ask, “Doc, what's this about?” because this is leading somewhere—and yes, he knows the overt reasoning: to get his ass out in daylight, but there's a subtle reason too—and he wants to know before he answers any more questions, even the most basic of ones.

He expects to be told to suss the reason out for himself, part of his therapy in thinking for himself and working out problems, but Howe gives him a half smile as he replies, “It's time, James,” and he doesn't have to elaborate, though he does. “Before you argue, I know you don't feel like you're that much better, I know you still have your nightmares and I know you still don't trust yourself around people, but you've come miles from where you were and it's time that you get out of this place and back into society.”

The twitch is involuntary.

“And before you get any thought in your head that we're going to throw you out, we're not. You're here until you are just as ready to go as we believe you are, but from this moment on, if you ask to leave, I will happily get your discharge paperwork together.” Howe shifts in the chair, crossing his legs.

“I don't have anywhere to go if I don't stay here,” he mutters.

“Really? Because Tony Stark has been up everyone's ass with promises that you'll go live in his Tower in New York when it's time.”

He has the good grace to nod, admitting to the fact that he'd known and accepted Tony's proposal to live there until he felt more on his metaphorical feet. He's not exactly happy about it, particularly since he'd learned that Steve is now living at Stark's place along with several stray SHIELD agents and a guy who has an alter ego called the Hulk, but it's a safety net.

“I'm going to reiterate that we're not throwing you out, James,” Howe says when his patient starts looking anywhere but at him, “but we've discussed that this was never a long term solution: you deserve to live your own life with your own choices.”

“And my own home with my own friends and my own family.”

“Mock all you want, Sergeant.”

The eyeroll is almost involuntary. Almost. “So we have things to talk about later?”

Howe almost fails to see the meaning behind the words. Almost. “We will always have things to talk about later. There is always going to be something you need to parse out to make sense of it and I am always going to be sitting in a chair across from you asking you the same question six times until you stop obfuscating. Whether that's when you are here in this hospital or I have to fly to New York twice a week, it'll happen.”

The tension drains from his shoulders then, some baser part of his mind latching on to the idea that once he's done here, he isn't going to be thrown back out into the world with no support at all. He doesn't even know why that bothered him in the first place, but apparently it did and he forces himself to admit it when he glances up at Howe...

...who lifts an eyebrow kindly, saying, “You know where I stand on that phrase you hate.”

“I know where you stand on a lot of phrases I hate.”

“That you do.” He gets to his feet and moves until only the bed is between them; for a few seconds, he only takes in the man before him and then says, “You have done remarkable work, James, and we are all very proud of you, but you can only go so far here. Sometimes to continue the journey, you have to make a leap of faith,” he gives Barnes a small smile, “You've got time to decide when and where you're going to do it, but the longer you put it off, the harder it becomes and trust me when I say that I and others aren't going to stand here and watch you backslide without reason.”

“So there's a time limit on my decision.”

“No. There's a mental limit. Time, you can have as much as you want, but Jackson and I won't let you mistake want for need and McManus and her crew aren't going to let you mistake malingering for progress, understood?”

He nods.

“Now, since I know you will spend the next twenty-four hours stewing over this, I would like you to do something.”

“What's that?”

“That handy dandy journal McManus brought you?” Howe lifts an eyebrow, as if in dare. “Use it. Write down anything you are thinking about,” he waits until he's caught Barnes' eye and then tells him, “Including Steve Rogers.”

“You're like a dog with a damn bone.”

“Yes I am.”

He growls and Howe doesn't so much as flinch, instead nodding his head as a goodbye and then he's out the door and back into the hall.

(By the end of the day, the journal has been torn, battered, thrown, and soaked in the sink, and he hates McManus a little bit when she comes in with a hairdryer. When she leaves, she deposits it right back into his hands.

“People do lots of unnecessary and cruel things to one another. Doesn't mean they're not salvageable,” she tells him.

He flashes his teeth at her.

She ignores his petulance. “Do you want some help getting started?”

Every part of him aches to reply, “Do I look like I need help getting started?” but he thinks of Jackson, his psychiatrist, and avoidance and misdirected anger; a voice at the back of his mind tells him to stop being a punk in a voice that sounds suspiciously like Steve's, and he swallows back against his pride and his stubbornness.

“I don't... there's so much,” he admits. “I don't know where I should begin.”

McManus pats his wrist. “Let's figure that out then.”

And by dawn, with McManus passed out in his recliner—and off the clock, he's made sure that someone punched her out so that she wouldn't get told off—he's filled so many pages that his fingers cramp around the pen, the ink smudging as he fights to remain awake.

It is, however, a losing battle and Tony finds him as visiting hours begin, pen lost onto the floor but words smeared onto skin as his head lays against the paper. Only one phrase is visible amongst the scratches and scribble, and Tony is careful to not admit that he'd seen it though they both know he has.)

Three days after Howe dropped his bomb shell, he passes a filled journal into his therapist's hands and says, “I didn't want to go outside because it means accepting that someday I have to leave and it's safe here,” then, “I pushed Steve away because I needed to figure out who I was without his influence.”

“You're an incredibly smart man.”

He blushes at that and scuffs a yellow, rubberized sock against the linoleum, the 'aw shucks' face firmly in place. “Naw.”

“Don't argue with your elders.”

“I think I'm the elder here.”

“Barnes, sit down,” Howe orders with a smile.

“Time to work?”

Howe nods. “Time to get you home.”


	7. Epilogue

Anderson Cooper, upon meeting him, fangirls. Or fanboys.

James isn't entirely sure what the correct terminology is though Darcy's tried to explain it a good dozen times, but either way, he finds himself grinning back at the newsman; Steve sits to his side, far enough that he's out of the camera frame, but not so far that James can't reach for his friend's hand when he needs to.

“You've been out of the hospital for six weeks,” Cooper says, “and you've been staying with Tony Stark. That must have been a huge change.”

“It was,” James admits—

_The Tower is loud and bustling despite the many floors Tony has put aside for them all: the common kitchen and living quarters on the 39th are constantly occupied, be it by errant SHIELD agents, Avengers, or the companions to either group._

_He tries to fit himself into it, but there's too much stimulation from music, televisions, talking. Colors are everywhere and when he manages five minutes without panicking, he counts it as triumph, only to lose it moments later when someone prods at his prosthetic._

_Howe ends up being the one to tell them all, “You don't throw a kid in the pool and expect them to remember swimming from when they were in their mother's belly,” and, “Ease him in to the group: two or three people for a movie, quiet breakfasts, invite him for a damn board game and let him say no.”_

—before adding, “But once I adapted to it, I can't imagine being anywhere else.”

“I've been there. It is a very nice layout and Mr. Stark is incredibly giving with his friends.”

Bucky nods. “He is, but...” he glances back at Steve, “...but it's not just Tony.

“Most of the time I spent under HYDRA's control, I barely had any human interaction. Well, interaction where I was seen as human,” he licks his lips, “I didn't have friends—I had handlers and masters.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's what it was: HYDRA saw me as nothing more than a weapon and that's what I was, since I didn't even see myself as human anymore.” Bucky squeezes the hand Steve sneaks under the desk, and goes on, “I was alone and I knew it, but the Tower and the people in it are amazing.”

“If I can ask, how so?”

Bucky nods and answers, “They treat me like a friend. They don't fear me or run away from me, they wake me up when I have nightmares.”

He doesn't say that he loves them, but he does.

Honestly, he does: Tony, Steve, Bruce, Clint, Thor, Natasha, Pepper, Coulson, Hill, Skye, Leo, Jemma, Darcy, Jane, JARVIS... he can't imagine what life would be like without them at this point, from Darcy's teachings about pop culture to Clint's burnt-crispy waffles in the morning to Tony's wild ranting about neurocircuitry and nanotech to Coulson's calm, unwavering presence.

The interview dwindles down and Anderson says, “Thank you for being on tonight. I know it must have been a huge challenge for you.”

“Steve never let me forget that he didn't get me home by himself,” he tells the camera as much as Anderson, “I'm not really an interview guy, but I wanted the chance to say thanks to the people who helped the big lug and the ones who helped me while I was out there.”

“I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that it was the least we could do.”

The red light on top of the camera goes out and the studio ends in applause, and Bucky gives his bashful face, which earns him coos from several of the ladies, and when the clapping dies down, Cooper admits, “I've been waiting for this since it was revealed that you were alive.”

“I hope I didn't disappoint then—you kept me company in the hospital a lot of nights.”

Cooper nods his head vigorously, telling Bucky, “It was an honor, sir. It's been an honor for everyone actually,” and he passes over a piece of paper with a phone number written on it. “That's my cell. Just in case you need it.”

Bucky takes it, causing Cooper to blush himself, and later that night, after Steve has left and he's all alone in his apartment, he drags out his rucksack from the closet: his books have migrated to the shelves and the utensils-plus-napkins stashed in a kitchen drawer, but there's still a change of clothes in the main compartment, a few spare bills and coins, and in a zippered pocket near the front, there's a small collection of paper scraps.

He adds Anderson's to it, careful to not crumple any of the others, then puts the bag back where it belongs and settles onto his couch.

It's time for a sandwich and the Daily Show.


End file.
